Businesses and other large organizations typically will have a mailroom or delivery department which serves as a central point for the receipt of items such as mail, parcels, overnight packages and other such items. Once such an item has been received by the mailroom or receiving department, it must then be delivered internally. For large organizations, which may have thousands of employees, the internal delivery time may equal or exceed the time required for delivery from the sender to the organization. Also, it is not uncommon for such items to be mis-delivered or lost after receipt. Such occurrences can create delay, ill-will, and even the risk of substantial liability where an organization is charged with receipt of information which never actually reaches the responsible individual.
For these and other reasons, systems have been developed to track receipt and internal delivery of items within large organizations. One such known system is marketed by the assignee of the subject invention under the trade name of "ARRIVAL".
"ARRIVAL" is a software system which typically runs on a microcomputer to maintain a database of items received by a large organization. Typically the record for a received item will include information such as a tracking number provided by the carrier who delivered the item, date and time delivered, addressee (i.e., the employee or individual for whom the item is actually intended), carrier, name of the employee who actually received the package from the carrier, and other information which the receiving organization may consider of interest. The information may initially be entered by an operator through a keyboard or may be scanned from the package itself. Typically, a carrier will incorporate information such as a tracking number in bar code form on an item, and "ARRIVAL" has been marketed with a portable bar code scanner and data entry device for the remote input of such data. Also, it is known to use OCR techniques for the input of such data.
Systems such as "ARRIVAL" can also include a database of employees or other individuals who may be receiving items delivered to the organization, where the employee database will include internal addresses for the employees. "ARRIVAL", or other such systems, will then periodically select a group of undelivered items in accordance with selected criteria, access the employee database to determine the internal addresses to which the items are to be delivered, and generate a manifest for the internal delivery of the selected items. After the internal delivery is made, the records for those items are then updated to document the actual delivery to the employee.
While such systems have proven to be successful for their intended purpose, problems have remained with regard to the generation of a manifest of items for internal delivery. While the receiving process has been highly automated in the "ARRIVAL" system, internal delivery has remained paper-intensive. The manifest is printed and provided to a delivery person who then delivers the items, records internal information about the delivery, which may include a signature of the receiving party, on paper, and returns that information for manual entry into the database. With such a system, errors can occur when names or numbers are misread, the manifest may be lost or damaged, and errors can occur when information is entered into the database to update records with internal delivery information. Further, heretofore when a signature was obtained upon delivery, a record of that signature had to be maintained in a separate paper file.
Accordingly, it is an object of the subject invention to provide a system for tracking receipt and internal delivery of items which includes an improved mechanism for generation of manifests and recording of internal delivery information.